This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Embracing Human Complexity, at Life’s Most Painful Moments
For some time now, I’ve been meaning to comment on the variety of ways by which contemporary American Jews have redefined the tradition of sitting shiva, from reducing its length to three days — and, in some instances, even to just one day — from seven, to removing the ritual practice from the precincts of…
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A General Guide to a Specific Kind of Judaism
Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism By Rebecca T. Alpert The New Press, 192 pages, $23.95. The general thesis of Rebecca Alpert’s new book, “Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism,” is that the old saying about two Jews and three opinions contains more than a seed of truth. Alpert cycles back…
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Training a Lens on Israel’s Female Soldiers
Serial No. 3817131 By Rachel Papo Powerhouse Books, 128 pages, $39.95. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child proclaims that its signatory states “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited…
The Latest
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August 8, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward received a heartbreaking letter from the two young Volotshinsky sisters, 6-year-old Hinde and 4-year-old Gishe, addressed to their father, who abandoned them and their mother in a shtetl near Minsk nearly five years ago: “Dear Father, we’re sending you a photograph of us so you can see…
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The Meaning of Khnyok
‘Growing up in Israel,” Anna Choder Hampton of Minneapolis writes, “I would hear my parents, both secular Jews (my mother from Poland and my father from Ukraine), use the word ‘chnyok’ — uttered with great disdain — when referring to ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. What exactly does ‘chnyok’ mean? In what language is it?” Khnyok — it’s…
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The Yeshiva Fades From Recollection
The yeshiva fades from recollection and in the spaces of memory where voices are stored, the rabbis of my youth chant questions and answers, as they swim through the Talmud. And when I have fallen — there is the image of the head rabbi, his disciples assimilated in a circle of dance, until he, too,…
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Music Are Haredi Women Taking Their Cues From Outkast?
Some ultra-Orthodox women are defiantly taking seats at the back of Israeli buses in the name of what they see as religiously mandated gender-segregation. What’s more, as the Forward reports, some of them (or at least one of them) are comparing their actions to those of civil rights legend Rosa Parks. Let’s set aside the…
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Music Yid Vid: Natalie Portman Gets Subcontinental
Natalie Portman takes a page from Bollywood in a video from her bohemian beau Devendra Banhart (who is, no doubt, by now the object of loathing from jealous young Jewish men the world over): I’m waiting for the inevitable backlash from the Hindu circles that don’t take kindly to such acts of artistic appropriation. In…
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Philadelphia Prakas
Philadelphia-born Manhattanite Zelda R. Stern has this inquiry: “Every current or former Jewish resident of Philadelphia whom I know calls stuffed cabbage ‘prakas.’ My parents, who spoke Yiddish, called them that, but so did all other Jews. I never heard the Yiddish word holiptshes used for stuffed cabbage until the 1960s, when my family came…
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August 1, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward When a hotel has a sign on it that says “Hebrews not served,” the hotelkeepers usually say that it’s not a question of antisemitism, it’s just business. They say that if they let Jews in, their regular Christian customers won’t come. But whenever their regular business goes south, they…
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Coffee Talk: Reading Friedrich Torberg’s Masterpiece
Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes By Friedrich Torberg Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer, edited by Sonat Birnecker Hart Ariadne Press, 249 pages, $24. Café society finds its most perfect literary expression in the anecdote, a short, fast form embodying the corner table’s blend of gossip and exaggeration, caffeinated humor and…
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